this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Git

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Article argues that git is intrinsically confusing--if you could redesign git from scratch, what would you change? (dl.acm.org)
submitted 8 months ago by testeronious@lemmy.world to c/git@programming.dev
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[–] Corbin@programming.dev 2 points 8 months ago

I agree that the UX of existing git commands is not great. They evolved in a particular insular environment -- Linux kernel development with heavy mailing-list usage and large multi-headed merges, with occasional pull requests and manual integration testing.

Check out my top-level comment for a link to git's data model. A data-first approach with blob, tree, commit, and tag can be enlightening. The on-disk format tries to balance integrity, easy manipulation, disk space, and incremental updates; it's also weakly monoidal, enabling distributed development. Look up the history of Bitkeeper and git; this is "a version control system [designed] from the ground up with documented architecture from the start"! And there are many non-C implementations as a result, like pure-Python dulwich.